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What’s the Matter with Ebooks: An Update

July 12, 2016

In an earlier post I speculated about the plateau in ebook adoption. According to recent statistics from publishers we are now actually seeing a decline in ebook sales after a period of growth (and then the leveling off that I discussed before). Here’s my guess about what’s going on—an educated guess, supported by what I’m hearing from my sources and network.

First, re-read my original post. I believe it captured a significant part of the story. A reminder: when we hear about ebook sales we hear about the sales from (mostly) large publishers and I have no doubt that ebooks are a troubled part of their sales portfolio. But there are many other ebooks than those reported by the publishers that release their stats, and ways to acquire them, and thus there’s a good chance that there’s considerable “dark reading” (as I called it) that accounts for the disconnect between the surveys that say that e-reading is growing while sales (again, from the publishers that reveal these stats) are declining.

The big story I now perceive is a bifurcation of the market between what used to be called high and low culture. For genre fiction (think sexy vampires) and other genres where there is a lot of self-publishing, readers seem to be moving to cheap (often 99 cent) ebooks from Amazon’s large and growing self-publishing program. Amazon doesn’t release its ebook sales stats, but we know that they already have 65% of the ebook market and through their self-publishing program may reach a disturbing 90% in a few years. Meanwhile, middle- and high-brow books for the most part remain at traditional publishers, where advances still grease the wheels of commerce (and writing).

Other changes I didn’t discuss in my last post are also happening that impact ebook adoption. Audiobook sales rose by an astonishing 40% over the last year, a notable story that likely impacts ebook growth—for the vast majority of those with smartphones, they are substitutes (see also the growth in podcasts). In addition, ebooks have gotten more expensive in the past few years, while print (especially paperback) prices have become more competitive; for many consumers, a simple Econ 101 assessment of pricing accounts for the ebook stall.

I also failed to account in my earlier post for the growing buy-local movement that has impacted many areas of consumption—see vinyl LPs and farm-to-table restaurants—and is, in part, responsible for the turnaround in bookstores—once dying, now revived—an encouraging trend pointed out to me by Oren Teicher, the head of the American Booksellers Association. These bookstores were clobbered by Amazon and large chains late last decade but have recovered as the buy-local movement has strengthened and (more behind the scenes, but just as important) they adopted technology and especially rapid shipping mechanisms that have made them more competitive.

Personally, I continue to read in both print and digitally, from my great local public library and from bookstores, and so I’ll end with an anecdotal observation: there’s still a lot of friction in getting an ebook versus a print book, even though one would think it would be the other way around. Libraries still have poor licensing terms from publishers that treat digital books like physical books that can only be loaned to one person at a time despite the affordances of ebooks; ebooks are often not that much cheaper, if at all, than physical books; and device-dependency and software hassles cause other headaches. And as I noted in my earlier post, there’s still not a killer e-reading device. The Kindle remains (to me and I suspect many others) a clunky device with a poor screen, fonts, etc. In my earlier analysis, I probably also underestimated the inertial positive feeling of physical books for most readers—which I myself feel as a form of consumption that reinforces the benefits of the physical over the digital.

It seems like all of these factors—pricing, friction, audiobooks, localism, and traditional physical advantages—are combining to restrict the ebook market for “respectable” ebooks and to shift them to Amazon for “less respectable” genres. It remains to be seen if this will hold, and I continue to believe that it would be healthy for us to prepare for, and create, a better future with ebooks.